Besides the obvious cropping, I basically bumped up the exposure a little bit and then recovered some of the portions of the image that were blown out. Then, I added some contrast, a little edge sharpness, and a gamma vignette.

I use a set of actions called "Totally Rad Actions" for most of my post work. It's a very powerful set of tools that have actions for almost everything you'd need.

I start out by removing distracting elements from the photos. Then I do a bunch of dodging/burning to bring out the highlights/shadows to bring focus on the areas I want. In this particular set, I applied a black and white filter, set it to about 80% and masked out the car and parts of the road that I wanted to bring more color back into. I applied a blue tint to the scene and masked out the car so it would pop more (but allowing a little blue tint so it wouldn't look totally out of place). I made sure the car and the road popped (even in the background) because that was my focus. That's pretty much it.

Would you mind posting a step by step, with like an image showing each stage of the process? Photoshop is really something I never learned how to use beyond basic things like color correction, simple cloning, etc. I've never been able to get that "bruised" look from the sky, etc.

Would you mind posting a step by step, with like an image showing each stage of the process? Photoshop is really something I never learned how to use beyond basic things like color correction, simple cloning, etc. I've never been able to get that "bruised" look from the sky, etc.

I actually got a lot of requests from this elsewhere so I created a screencast of the process: